This is going to be the quickest blog I've ever written, so please excuse any spelling or grammar mistakes or, worse yet, a general roughness of style. I'm just trying to get this down before I leave for Bible Study (at Shakeys! Whoo!). Here goes: I went home to walk Penny yesterday after work and ended up going on an "adventure"--at least that's what I kept saying to my dog as we walked down narrow streets where cars got thisclose! to us and the scenery was less than...hmmm, less than idyllic, I guess. Anyone familiar with the Mariana Apartments in East Los Angeles? They're these huge apartment buildings parallel to the train tracks that occupy entire blocks, and they're not very pretty but they're pretty affordable (I think), and so they're kind of a haven for the socio-economically challenged. I grew up just around the corner and up the hill from these apartments, but I never ventured there because my gramma told me it wasn't safe and I knew better than to try my luck against them. Them being the boys with the shaved heads and the baggy shorts; the girls with drawn-in eyebrows and too much eyeliner. But yesterday I was in the mood to walk, and my usual Cal-State Los Angeles route wasn't gonna work because there were just TOO many people on campus at that time and I didn't feel like I could handle all the eyes. So I decided to walk an alternate way and ended up right by the Mariana apartments. The first thing I noticed was the graffiti. Grafitti on buildings, trees, even sidewalks! Friggin sidewalks! I mean, come on! At least when I see it on freeway signs or the underside of bridges I'm somewhat impressed, asking myself how THE HECK they managed to tag there, and if they really have that kind of resourcefulness wouldn't it be AWESOME if that energy was channeled in a more productive (and not so ugly) way? Sigh. The graffiti was an eyesore. But then again so were the apartments themselves--just these big, greyish-white, homogenous squares, bland and bare and betraying the chaos around them and inside them. Even the giant signs beckoning to passerby with the word "POOL!" were an eyesore--but mostly they were contradictions, trying to make the unappealing appealing with their big, bold letters set against a blue background. A pool, really? THAT'S supposed to make me or some other person who wanders by want to rent? Maybe if they had a jacuzzi. Hmmm. I walked by and stared curiously at the windows facing the street, trying to see if I could perhaps get a glimpse of what these units contained inside. But mostly the blinds were drawn, so what that outer drabness concealed evaded me. I was, however, able to SMELL. An odd combination of grease and laundry detergent struck my nose when I was about mid-block--women mashing up beans, perhaps? And simultaneously washing a load of their son's children's dirty school clothes? Perhaps. And the sounds, of course! There were a lot, but mostly I heard the rap music emanating from the parked Honda across the street. And then there was the girl in the too-tight blouse who squealed delightedly when she got into the passenger seat of a blue SUV. Anyways, I walked further and rounded the corner and had to scoop up my dog into my arms because these two big German Shepherds barked and barked at her and she refused to walk further. And then I walked by all these teenagers in school uniforms and refused to meet their gaze because YES! high-school students still scare me! That was kind of my feeling throughout, I guess--not exactly fear, more like a vague uneasiness, a sense that all is NOT well in the world if people still live like that. Not that I was ever much better off up in hills--it's just that I was sheltered, taught differently, treated differently. So I grew up across the street from drug-dealing gangsters with psychotic tendencies but never saw, heard, or believed any of it. What I knew was school, books, the life movies and my dad told me I could have...But walking by those apartments, I began to wonder why. Why have I always thought of myself as so different from them (the people I grew up around), and why have I always believed that I should, that I CAN, leave everything I've known and pretend I've ALWAYS lived on tree-lined streets, I've ALWAYS liked hummus, ALWAYS drank Starbucks coffee and yada yada yada yada--ALWAYS done everything just like those frufru (spelling?) yuppies that are slowly taking over every part of Los Angeles except for the truly, truly ghetto ones? Sigh. I don't know. I just know that I rounded the corner and walked up the hill to my gramma's house, where it was warm and quiet and Penny finally stopped shaking. Home sweet home. For now, at least.

A little sprinkling of something magical

It occurred to me last week, while I was dog-sitting my dog (don't ask) because my grandmother left town for the weekend, that I'm grateful for the life experiences I've had, good and bad and bland and everything in between. I was sitting in the backyard, looking out at the 10 freeway and downtown as the sun was setting and casting an orange-tinged light on everything around me, and the trees were swaying rhythmically in a barely-there breeze and I just felt it, that thing, that quality, that has always infused my grandmother's house (and her yard in particular, with its breath-taking view of grassy hills, congested freeways, and downtown buildings set against a backdrop of orange and blue and purple and pink sky, all rolled into one chaotic but somehow serene picture of urban life)--it's magic, it's godliness, it's all the love my grandparents poured into us, their spoiled, eye-rolling grandchildren, and it does something to me inside so that the years fall away and I'm just me, ageles and timeless and bodiless even, filled to the brim with a sense of wonder and peace so profound my heart wants to explode and all I can do is feel and cry, cry and feel some more. As I sat there, letting this feeling roll over me in waves, I thought suddenly of my childhood, of all those summer evenings when Emily and I ran and played and ate Ninja Turtle popsicles in that very yard. That's what I remember most, you see. That's what sticks with me, what dances tantalizingly at the edge of my mind even when I feel like who I was then and who I am now are irreconcilable--that's what reminds me that even in my darkest, meannest, most broken hours/days/years I DID believe in goodness once and can do so once again. Innocence. Purity. Happiness. Acceptance. Love, abundant, unrestrained, shameless love. Those are the things that I remember when I stare out at the horizon and recall what it was like for me growing up. And I reach this conclusion: If I've known pain or heartache, even if they were dispensed in quantities no six or seven year old child should ever have to bear, I've also known love. Sacrificial love, unconditional love, the kind of love that has your grandmother walking up and down a hill three times a day to take you to and pick you up from school, that has her spending the remaining part of the day in the kitchen, cooking food you'll later turn your nose up at because you'd rather just drink Capri Sun until your dad comes home from work because he promised to take you to Hot Wings and you are SO excited (he calls later that day and tells you he has to work late [again], so Hot Wings will have to wait). I know what it's like to smile with my whole heart because my cousin is here and OMG, I think we're going to the park, and maybe the grown-ups will take us to Sizzler after so Emily and I can chow down on an odd assortment of dinosaur chicken nuggets, fruit loops, and garlic bread. All that, it's mine. The home videos belong to my grandmother (and she guards them with her life), but the memories, the hope it still inspires in my heart, are MINE. And I can't complain. I can't complain because I was allowed to be ME (such an elusive concept these days), to prance around in plastic heels at the park, to wear the most hideous clothes imaginable partly because I liked pink and so wanted every item on my body to be some variation of that hue but mostly because words like "pride" and "vanity" didn't exist in my vocabulary then. I can't complain. So I inhale deeply and close my eyes and allow myself to see the ghosts--the imprints me and Emily and Shearelyn and Tia Honey and Uncle Franky left in that yard, left in the deepest, most sheltered recesses of my heart--and I want to laugh out loud because so much time has passed and so much has changed but sitting here, mesmerized by a world awash in orange, nothing has changed at all and my desires are no more complicated or sinister than wanting Emily to come over so we can race around the parking lot in our roller blades. Love. It never changes. Maybe our teenage years got the best of us, maybe that cousin and I no longer speak because vanity and insecuriy got in the way, maybe I know now that even home-made Albondiga soup and weekly trips to Hot Wings can't and don't make the world the haven I once thought it was--but her love, their love, my love, OUR love, remain. I love them (those ghosts) for who they were, and I love them (those flesh-and-bone people who sometimes drive me crazy or say the wrong things or frustrate me to the point of tears) for who they are, for what they've brought to my life, for the magic they sprinkled on my tongue so that even now, at 22, I can taste fragments of it on a day like that day, when I sat in my grandmother's back yard, watching the trees and the hills and the cars on the freeway and the buildings that reach toward something in the sky that none of us can see.